Apple hires Adobe’s chief technology officer

As the chief technology at Adobe Systems Inc. since 2008, Kevin Lynch was a key force behind the company’s widely used Flash online image-presentation technology. Now he’s vice president of technology at Apple Inc., which has refused to support Flash on its iPhone and other mobile devices.

Lynch left Adobe March 22 to take a new position at Apple, according to a statement issued by Adobe. Apple hasn’t released an official statement, though according to Lynch’s LinkedIn page he now holds the position of vice president of technology at Apple, which is No. 3 in the Internet Retailer Top 500.

While at Adobe, Lynch frequently played up the advantages of using Flash technology to render images on the web, defending its capabilities in Adobe blogs despite criticism from Apple. Apple has avoided designing its mobile devices to render Flash, which it says doesn’t perform well on mobile devices and drains their batteries.

Nonetheless, Adobe switched from developing a mobile version of Flash in November 2011 to render images on Apple mobile devices to focusing instead on the development of HTML5, a web programming language that Apple has embraced.

Before he was named chief technology officer of Adobe in February 2008, Lynch had worked at Adobe as its chief software architect since December 2005. He joined Adobe in 2005 when Adobe acquired Macromedia, the original developer of Flash, where Lynch had been chief software architect since January 1996.

Prior to Macromedia, Lynch worked in the operating systems and applications group at technology company General Magic from 1992 to 1996, and in the core technology group at Frame Technology from 1988 to 1992.